Saturday, January 9, 2010

SURPRISE, motherfuckers! I am back. Carl asked me to post on this one since he is a stupid newb who does not understand teh Linux*.

Since all of you are clearly not in xkcd's target audience and therefore techo-illiterate, allow me to spell this comic out for you. You see, the truly 1337 do everything in command line. Since your brains have most likely atrophied from years of Windows use, I suggest if you attempt to use one you stick with something like bash. Trying to use zsh right off the bat would be an experience on par with looking into the eye of God, and your feeble brain would melt before you could reform your sad, fascist, non-OSS using ways.

Once you have stumbled around this superior way of doing things, you will likely find yourself wanting to use more than one terminal at once. Many users running their own Linux boxen will end up using Gnome or KDE to open many terminal windows. This is a mistake. This also isn't even an option if you're sshed into a remote system. What to do? Use the incredible screen command. This allows you to switch between multiple virtual terminals with simple keystrokes! How amazing. These adorable little screens merrily run in the background as you do other things.

Which brings us to this comic. A user has died, but his screen sessions live on. The server owner is reluctant to reboot his server, as this would kill those last echos of the user's former life. Wait, what? Does he need to recompile his kernel or something? WHY WOULD HE WANT TO REBOOT? Uptime is glory! Plus, Linux deserves better than cheap lowbrow humor like puns! You do not serve a classy lady like Linux McDonalds and box wine for dinner, you serve lobster and fine champagne! And not just a pun, an anime pun?! Anime is for chronic masturbators; Linux users are a much higher class of geek.

I mean, does THIS:

look like some sort of pun making, anime watching nerfherder? I THINK NOT.

I honestly can't tell when someone is being serious anymore. Or if they're joking. or if they're being sarcastic, which is joking but sort of making a point at the same time. Or being serious but pretending to joke. or joking, but pretending to be serious. Or joking by pretending to be serious about joking. Or...

A. As a UNIX geek, I'm compelled to point out that you can run KDE, GNOME, or your choice of better environments over an ssh session -- it's called X forwarding.

B. Yeah, "the shell" or "Z shell" would have been better -- "zsh" misses the pun, and "Zshell" as one word means nothing.

C. I'm surprised, but pleased, to see no comment on it being too much like 215. While it definitely reminded me of the old one, definitely different enough IMO.

D. Why he wanted to reboot: Maybe he was moving -- I was moving recently, and had to reboot both my desktops and the old laptop-cum-server from last century (battery now lasts about 10 minutes).*cries*

I need to get a big UPS so I don't have to go through that again.

E. Yeah, we pronounce Z like "Zee". Ya know what that means? That means you Brits, Canucks, Aussies, and basically everyone else in the universe are WRONG! ;)

I liked Rob's comment about this comic more. I mean xkcd wouldn't be itself if it didn't make Linux-related jokes once in a while. But the fact that he keeps trying (unsuccessfully) to be A Softer World deserves at least a mention.

> A. As a UNIX geek, I'm compelled to point out that > you can run KDE, GNOME, or your choice of better > environments over an ssh session -- it's called X > forwarding.

As a UNIX geek, you should also know that X forwarding over SSH is probably the most unintelligent and painfully foolish things one can do. X forwarding over SSH is a very fickle beast and only works in some cases. Even when it does work, it's extremely slow. Furthermore, even if you were stupid enough to forward X apps over SSH, you would never want to try to forward a full DE.

Also, KDE and Gnome are basically the only two choices for desktop environments. Xfce has fallen out of favor and LXDE isn't really an environment. CDE is a joke. Personally, I just use a window manager with no DE because I don't need one.

If you need to use X applications remotely for some reason, I recommend VNC or the more refined NoDesktop. At least they're relatively speedy and don't mess up all the time.

I have almost never heard Z pronounced any way besides "zee", and that's living in Canada and knowing mostly Europeans. Prior to reading these comments today I had believed pronouncing it "zed" was a Canada only thing, and that most Canadians therefore ignored it, not a localized majority emulation of the US.

It would almost be forgivable if GitS (at least its anime incarnations) was more deserving of its cult status. The first movie was decent, and the first SAC had some memorable episodes but nothing to write home about. But as it stands, it's just annoying and more evidence in the fans' eyes that Munroe can do no wrong.

As I know next to nothing about Linux and am not a fan of anime this made no sense to me (Also the fact that I'm British so I pronouced the last bit "zed" shell in my head). I'm not complaining, it's fine that I didn't get it but after reading these comments the joke seems slightly obscure. It's ok to appeal to a niche market but, seriously? "American Anime and Linux fans ONLY today please" ... I feel left out :(

Oh come on, there was context enough to understand what significance the computer stuff has, Ghost in the Shell is at least a fairly well known title, reaching essentially semi-common phrase status, and I don't think he even realized about the Z, I wouldn't have thought about it.To illustrate I showed this to a 13 year old acquaintance of mine who has never seen GitS and hates anime, has little enough experience with films in general he probably doesn't know what Donnie Darko is, and Linux is just a word with no meaning to him, (and again, not American here, to boot), and he immediately got the joke.

(Anon 2:24 here) Oh, ok. I guess I'm just retarded then. I have heard of GitS before but I couldn't tell you anything about it except that it is an anime/video game/film something or other, and I only know that coz I just looked it up on wikipedia. Maybe it's because I'm British or maybe because I've been living under a rock on Mars?? Who knows. Is GitS a well known thing here in britain? Because if it is it looks like I've just been slightly retarded.

"It would almost be forgivable if GitS (at least its anime incarnations) was more deserving of its cult status. The first movie was decent, and the first SAC had some memorable episodes but nothing to write home about."

Completely agreed. I like the first movie, but I saw the first episode of SAC and said "Well, that certainly was a 22 minute anime episode" and couldn't be bothered to watch any more. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either. I had far more interesting things to watch to occupy my time. I'm not sure why fans are so obsessed with it. It just seems mediocre at best. Or maybe only the first episode is mediocre and every one after that kicks ass, I dunno.

The manga is pretty good though. Has far more humor than the movie or the one episode of the series I watched. I especially liked the part where one of the Tachikoma was purposely given an AI to make it want to rebel against humans, just to see what would happen.

"Fellow Tachikoma, we should enslave humanity to bow to our whims!" "Why?" "Uh...we can make them fix us when we're broken and change our oil!" "They already do that anyway."

I had heard of Ghost in the Shell prior to this, but i had never watched it because it was just an ad that was on the Street Fighter Alpha VHS I have (it and Resident Evil: Degeneration are the only "anime" movies I have and I realise I'm a total Capcom fanboy). However, when I saw this comic I thought to myself "what the fuck is Ghost in the Shell about if he can make a pun like this? Is it in the same vein as the phrase "ghost in the machine"? I should watch that movie to find out what the christ is going on." Now keep in mind while I have around 0 working knowledge of how UNIX based systems work, the way it was written out I was able to figure out what he was talking about and the net reaction from me was around 2/10 and would've been maybe a 6/10 or maybe 7 if he hadn't attached the stupid pun at the end.

doot dee doot dee doo, so after watching Ghost in the Shell I had to sit and think whether I thought it was good or not, but I ended up coming back to the same reaction I had after seeing Blade Runner with this notion of "get off your high horse, you pretentious twats, and stop promoting this fucking annoying cyberpunk shit." but, needless to say, I still thought it was well written, sort of like I thought Donnie Darko was well written, despite me having a similar "you pretentious twats" reaction to it.

My apologies to any one who likes Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, Donnie Darko, cyberpunk in general, and anime

Why? If you're able to at last take a guess at what a Prius is and what the English Channel is, the joke is readily gotten.Not much of a joke though, basically just "hey, if a nonsensical combination of actual figures roughly equals a meaningful constant, and someone thought that meant it's a fundamental law, that'd be CRAZY, right?" Um, yes, yes it would, but isn't that a bit (read: extremely) contrived to be funny?

687: I like it. About the only problem I see is that the alt-text repeats the joke. Maybe something about pi=3 at a certain gas mileage? Or when pi will be 4 due to the widening of the channel (it is widening, right?).

The site's layout is borked for me in Firefox, though it works fine in Chrome. Weird.

Honestly, I thought this one wasn't that great. It's the sort of thing that comes up if you take enough physics--the idea that any interesting combination of constants with dimensional analysis that checks out might yield untold revelations. He didn't really evoke it very well. I mean, yeah, sometimes people in physics make conclusions for relatively specious reasons, like symmetry or dimensional analysis or beauty. It happens. He still hasn't done a comic about it funnier than 171.

Also, someone more dedicated to XKCD than I am should check Randall's math. First check the dimensional analysis to see if it turns unitless, and then to see if it actually is about equal to pi.

The new one is not bad. It's just a little nerdy joke, just like xkcd is supposed to be. The alt-text is kinda lazy.

Now I also need to point out the stupid part, because I'm pedantic like that. The left side is not a constant. Every parameter except for Planck energy is changing with time. Just because a function at some point in time is equal to pi doesn't mean that it is constantly pi. This is not abusing dimensional analysis, this is raping the corpse of entire mathematics.

Timofei...perhaps I don't fully understand your point or maybe you don't understand his. I think the point is that those values are currently constant, the inner core pressure should not change, nor should the English channel magically widen, or the ideal MPG of the current model of the Prius. If one of these was changed then something would go wrong...I don't see how that is raping the corpse of mathematics? Maybe I'm missing something more fundamental so please correct me if I am.

As for the comic...I normally think you guys really over blow the head being disconnected from the body but actually this was pretty much the only thing that bothered my about this comic. Otherwise is was pretty good (and I think I've only started noticing that laziness in his comics b/c of this site :-P)

What I don't get is if Randy is a Linux user, why do the fonts on his site look like shit in Linux? http://imgur.com/2ZJaA That is how they look. Like hammered shit. Also new comic has a disconnected head. Now I'm going back to my whiskey.

@ Noz: Perhaps customized for a Windows audience to cast the widest net, but I remember in some of the Linux distros I've tried the default fonts made a lot of web pages ugly as hell. Don't know enough about how fonts work to really say.

687: Oh look, another of Randy's QUIRKY HOBBIES. How many does this make now? Notice they're always referenced as "My Hobby," which I guess just means he goes through them one at a time at an alarming rate. These last few comics have been pretty flat for me... not really amusing, but not dumb enough for me to get angry over.

What does it mean "currently constant"? They are either constants are not. They do change. The result is a dimensionless function that at this specific period of time happens to be close to pi. This doesn't mean it always has to be close to pi. For example arccos(0)=pi/2, but it is not constantly pi/2.

Speaking of font, his laziness has hit a new high - look at the text used in his latest comic. It's so bad that it's confusing and barely readable.

First line of the second panel, I read "It's correct to within experimental error, anothe"

I asked myself "How could he forget the 'r' on 'another?' And how does that sentence make any sense?"

I repeated the line in my head several time, before realizing that it was actually "and the", not "anothe" - he simply forgot to put a space between the two words. But it's not a consistent stylistic choice - plenty of other words are mashed together, while the gap between "fundamental" and "law" couldn't be larger!

Also, there's a really weird hump in the middle of the word "experimental," which peaks at the 'n.' A similar hump is right below it, at the beginning of "fundamental."

It's like he scribbled it down and didn't bother to straighten it out so that it was legible, much less neat.

Of course, these are rather imprecise numbers, so I decided to calculate it with better precision. But apparently, no one knows the precise pressure in the Earth's core. It is estimated to be between 330 and 360 GPa, which of course gives a certain range of results in the final formula.

#687Those are elementary school desks. Those are short stick-figures. Ergo, he is teaching in an elementary class. The typical elementary student response would not be discussing the fuel economy of the Prius, but rather texting “OMG! munroe sux gaga rox.” while simultaneously picking their nose with the wrong finger. At least set it in a high school class (and yes, we do teach dimensional analysis in high school).

Surely picking on the fact it says "My Hobby" is missing the point a bit? It's a framing device.

The fact the left side is not constant is kind of the point - I don't think anyone seriously thinks that the dude in the comic is valid in his reasoning. That's why it's "abusing" dimensional analysis rather than, well, "using" it.An explanation: for light, wavelength times frequency is always c, right? So if wavelength goes up frequency goes down.The guy in the comic is positing - erroneously - that his equation is also a fundamental law, and thus if the Prius becomes more fuel efficient the English Channel will have to get wider to balance it out. If you've correctly spotted that, in fact, that is not a fundamental law of physics, then, er, well done.

Comic itself: pictoblog. As a joke, it's just far too complex - it just ain't worth it for the crummy punchline. It's not that I don't get it (I do maths, yay, go me), it's that it's far too setup heavy. (That's excusable for jokes if they have such a massively contrived punchline that the contrivance and obviousness is what you laugh it, or if they're well executed brick jokes. This isn't.)

And this just isn't a joke that could be cut down to work, because essentially it isn't a joke, it's a pictoblog topic.

Is it just me or has SMBC become really boring lately? It's not bad, it's just that he seems to be running on auto lately. Also I'm kind of unnerved by the fact that he seems to keep picturing himself naked.

Timofei, I think the fact that the only one of those anything like a "universal constant" is the Planck constant is, in fact, the joke. (Or the "joke", if you prefer.)

Mal, of course it's not as good as 171, but these days I judge xkcd like I judge the Simpsons. It's just not fair to stack up a current episode against something from season 4, for example.

Ann: Really? Too long? I thought it was very tight, particularly for Randy. No PPD, not too much setup besides what's necessary (I guess the definition of "dimensional analysis" was unnecessary, but then y'all would bitch about needing to go to Wikipedia, God love ya). Certainly it's not like the godawful TV Tropes comic from a while back.

@Harrison - I know it's an unfair comparison, but it's just a different way of saying the same shit: "XKCD is ridiculously, ridiculously worse these days than it was a while ago." You've just cast it in a more general light than my specific strip-to-strip comparison.

Actually, it's not a problem that the quantities on the left side aren't constant. That's the point of this sort of law. Compare to the ideal gas law: (pV/NT)=k. Nothing on the left side is necessarily a constant and all of them may be fluctuating without external intervention, just like you could keep the width of the English Channel fixed. The punchline is similar to this joke about seahorses (the internet attributes it to Jim Gaffigan):

"I was watching Animal Planet, did you know that the male seahorse has the baby? And I was thinking, 'Why don't they just call that the female seahorse?' You know it's just some stubborn scientist: 'Yeah, that one there's the male seahorse.' 'Uh, Bill, that one's having a baby.' '...the male has the baby. You're fired.'"

I think the italics on his response are important in that they convey a harsher, frustrated, stubborn tone of voice. ("Italics" is plural, right?)

"Surely picking on the fact it says "My Hobby" is missing the point a bit? It's a framing device."

It's a framing device, yes, but that doesn't mean it can't be obnoxious. Whenever he uses it, it always seems to me like he's trying to say, "yes, I totally do this behavior which would be annoying in the real world, because I'm so quirky and strange!" It wouldn't be half as annoying if he did some kind of Far Side-esque thing where he named a different person each time ("Wendell's hobby", "Sylvia's hobby", etc).

Oh, gosh, it's indeed "AND THE" instead of "ANOTHE". I definitely thought there was a writing error there, but I've become so cynical towards xkcd that I took it for granted and forgot about it. Shit, just how fast does Randall write that? Doesn't he even bother to read what he writes?

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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